1898 Spanish general election

A general election was held in Spain on Sunday, 27 March (for the Congress of Deputies) and on Sunday, 10 April 1898 (for the Senate), to elect the members of the 8th Cortes under the Spanish Constitution of 1876, during the Restoration period. All 445 seats in the Congress of Deputies—plus two special districts—were up for election, as well as 180 of 360 seats in the Senate.

Since the Pact of El Pardo, an informal system known as turno or turnismo was operated by the monarchy of Spain and the country's two main parties—the Conservatives and the Liberals—to determine in advance the outcome of elections by means of electoral fraud, often achieved through the territorial clientelistic networks of local bosses (the caciques), ensuring that both parties would have rotating periods in power. As a result, elections were often neither truly free nor fair, though they could be more competitive in the country's urban centres where caciquism was weaker.

The election was called amid a period of political unstability, following the assassination in August 1897 of Prime Minister Antonio Cánovas del Castillo by Italian anarchist Michele Angiolillo, and the brief premiership of Marcelo Azcárraga. Respecting the turno system, Queen Regent Maria Christina appointed a new government under Liberal leader Práxedes Mateo Sagasta on 4 October 1897, tasking them with the formation of a new majority. In the wake of Cánovas's death, the Conservative Party was left in disarray, split between Francisco Silvela's Conservative Union, a faction led by Carlos O'Donnell, Duke of Tetuán, and Francisco Romero Robledo's re-established Liberal Reformist Party. The result of the election was a Liberal majority in both chambers.

This would be the last Spanish general election to be held in Cuba and Puerto Rico, as the Spanish–American War, which would start only a few weeks after the election, would lead to the loss of all Spanish colonies in the Caribbean and the Pacific.